12/22/13

Twas around winter solstice, alone in the house
I was reading the Bible, as quiet as a mouse.
The stories were thrown in the book without care;
contradictions abounded, mistakes everywhere.

I could not understand, or believe
what it said,

its tall tales of people come back
from the dead;

original sin, which was such a bum
rap,

blood sacrifice, curses, and other
such crap.

When deep down inside I knew something's the matter
I sprang to the Web to make sense of such chatter.
Away to the Google I flew like a flash,
to try and make out heads or tails of this trash.

The search engine gave me back
millions of hits;

molesters, and con men, and other such
shits.

When, what to my wondering eyes should
appear,

but hundreds of gods from the earliest
year.

With a little old edit, the story of Horus
I knew in a moment it must be the sou-rce.
More numerous than seagulls, gods and goddesses came,
and I whistled, and marveled, and called out their name;

Osiris! Adonis! Dionysus! Mithra!

There's Attis and Ishtar! And Baldr and
Krishna!

To the land of the dead! Down to hell
they all went,

to the underworld, after their lives were
all spent.

Like fertility symbols these gods they all die,
and then get resurrected, back up in the sky.
So back up to heaven these deities flew,
to start new religions, and Jesus did too.

Right there in the gospels, just like
you would guess,

a brand new Messiah turned up in this
mess.

As I willingly tried to suspend
disbelief

from the pages this Jesus guy came
like a thief.

He was beat all to shit, from his head to his foot,
and put onto a cross just like Horus was put;
His birth in a manger, and marked by a star,
that's a detail he stole from the Goddess Ishtar.

His magic trick changing his water to
wine,
was a ripoff of Bacchus who used to brew
'shine.
He claims to have brought people back
from the dead,
that's just like the other gods—what
they all said.

And in some of his stories he acts
like a cad:
“Hate your mother and father! Don't
bury your dad!”
Sends his guys to steal donkeys, and
kills farmer's pigs,
and cusses a tree out for not giving
figs.

He's a crazy old preacher, who just seems kind of silly
though I had to admit that his book was a dilly,
that tried hard to steal those old stories by stealth,
and I laughed when I read it, in spite of myself.

A shift of my eyes and a twist of my
head,

to the headlines, told me I had nothing
to dread:

all the Pope's rules have been shown not
to work,

evangelicals picket, and act like a jerk;

They cry “war on Christmas” and make silly fusses,
when we put up billboards, or signs on our buses.
But to all the fanatics I give this epistle,
away from your church people fly like a missile,

12/14/13

The Freedom From Religion Foundation placed an 8.5-foot-tall Scarlet A monument and banner in downtown Chicago. Here's the banner.

The text reads,

At this season of the Winter Solstice, we celebrate the Birth of the Unconquered Sun--the TRUE reason for the season.

Wait, what does that even mean? The Unconquered Sun, it turns out is Sol Invictus, one of the main gods of the old Romans. One can only conclude that the stereotypical "militant atheists of the "FFRF worship the sun god. They've been doing a good job of hiding it, but now that they've outed themselves as sun worshippers, will the christstains still call them godless?

12/7/13

monument removed from the Oklahoma City Capitol grounds, and now the Temple of Satan applied to donate a monument to go next to the 10 C's. ROFL!

They've done this sort of thing before. Back when Rick Perry was pimping a bill to get prayer in school they

staged a Satanic rally thanking Rick Scott for endorsing a bill that
allowed Satanism in schools, ensuring that children who might otherwise
never learn of the Satanic creed could be exposed to it in the
classroom. This was a harsh reminder that religious freedom applies to
all, and the United States is a nation based upon religious pluralism.

Religion can and should be a metaphorical narrative construct by which
we give meaning and direction to our lives and works. Our religions
should not require of us that we submit ourselves to unreason and
untenable supernatural beliefs based on literal interpretations of
fanciful tales. Non-believers have just as much right to religion—and
any exemptions and privileges being part of a religion brings—as anybody
else.

Well that sounds pretty interesting on a couple of fronts.

Churches aren't supposed to dabble in politics, ostensibly,
and these guys are as much a political activist group as a church

They reject anything supernatural—yay, them—and most
atheists I argue with talk to insist that

religion = belief in a supernatural deity

but they haven't objected that these Satanists aren't a real, atheist, religion. Awkward.